The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

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lavender

Lavender is one of the few plants that I rescued from my deprecated herb garden on the front verge.

The rescue involved digging up the mature and woody plant and carting it round the back of the house in the wheelbarrow. The plan was to propagate about twenty stem cuttings and throw the old plant away. H was the digger and pusher of the barrow, and I was going to take cuttings at my leisure. We ended up doing the whole job in one go as the bush was about two metres round, and even in the barrow it was taking up a fair bit of room in our small back yard.

All twenty cuttings failed eventually, for various reasons. The big one being that we forgot to tell our neighbour about them when we went away to conference for a week. Just a week, but a week that mattered. January in Perth, Western Australia is hot and dry.

A friend gave me some potted cuttings of her lavender, for which I’m most grateful. These I have planted across the front of the porch so we can smell them while sitting on the porch. They are very slow growing in comparison to the lavender that I had, but I felt that at least the garden was not without lavender.

Then I had a wonderful surprise, when I started to get out in the garden again last year I noticed that there were hundreds of lavender seedlings all up the side of the block and in the back yard. The seeds had been brushed from the parent plant as we wheeled it round the back.

I made plans to re-plant the seedlings in a specially prepared plot on the other side of the house with the intent of nurturing them until they are big enough to plant out on the side verge together with rosemary and santolina.

Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it. Somebody else noticed the flourishing seedlings and helped themselves. It meant that the nursery plot I had created was way too big for the number of seedlings I had left to transplant, but it was still about 120 seedlings to move over about a week.

I’ve had some losses due to hurrying in some cases and perhaps not being careful enough, but my biggest pest is one of my cats digging them up. Sigh. There are still about 90 plants, and most of them are growing well. Perhaps just a bit too well, as shortly I will have to transplant some of them to increase the distance between them. That is, if the cat does not continue to help.